


Without a Moment’s Hesitation

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Dungeon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Escape, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Betrayal, Implied/Referenced Flogging, Loyalty, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:25:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Rat, who was spying in Jiardasia, is arrested, thrown into a dungeon, and flogged. Marco personally rescues him and brings him back to Samavia, then comforts him. In bed. With most of his clothes off. With platonic intentions. Because he’s Marco. Fortunately for us, the Rat has other intentions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without a Moment’s Hesitation

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Nothing But the Truth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108392) by [osprey_archer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer). 



Young Rastka shot the lock off the cell door. As the darkness rang with the harsh echo of the report off metal and stone, he and Marco rushed into the dank cell. Marco tried not to conjure up the sound of boots pounding down the corridor. His men would have overcome and incapacitated the Jiardasian dungeon guards by now. He hoped.

“The lantern, Your Highness,” Young Rastka hissed. Marco held it up and drew his arm back and forth until he saw what he was looking for: a still form lying on a pallet, one pale arm stretched out over his head, a heavy shackle around the wrist. 

“Rat! Jem!” Marco whispered, dropping to one knee beside the pallet and setting the lantern down beside him. 

The Rat’s eyelids fluttered several times, finally opening on clouded eyes.

“Jem. It’s Marco. Emil Rastka’s here with me.” He lay his gloved hand on the Rat’s cheek. “We’re getting you out of here.”

“Marco,” the Rat groaned, leaning his face into Marco’s hand. The word seemed to have cost him a great deal of effort to utter. Marco smelled iron in the air, too strong to be coming from the shackle on the Rat's wrist or the chain that attached it to the dungeon wall.

On the other side of Marco, Young Rastka swore. He held his pistol in one hand and the chain in the other. “I’ll have to shoot this off too,” he snapped. “Mind the ricochet, Your Highness, for both your own sake and Lord Ratcliffe’s.”

Marco sat on the cold stone floor with the Rat’s head in his lap and his own shoulders hunched forward. Young Rastka’s father would have berated him for using his own body to shield another. His own father, he thought, would have understood.

The pistol fired again nearly point-blank against one of the middle links, sundering it completely. Marco jerked involuntarily at the sound, crouching further over the Rat, but the bullet had disappeared into the darkness and did not come back.

“Take the lantern,” Marco said sharply to Young Rastka as he gathered the Rat up in his arms. His insides went cold as he felt a sticky slipperiness, and his heart clenched when the Rat whimpered. “We’ve got to run.”

 

The run, not on foot but on horseback, was a harrowing one, though no Jiardasians pursued them. He’d later learn that his men had killed two of the dungeon guards, then bound and gagged the others and locked them into a cell with their own keys. They lagged behind Marco, the Rat, and Young Rastka to fend off any possible attacks on their Prince and his two closest companions.

But the three of them rode all night long, Marco with the Rat under his left arm and his right hand on the reins. There had been no time to bundle the Rat securely onto the horse’s croup. _He will be jostled less this way, in any case,_ Marco told himself, although part of his mind knew that it made little difference. He wanted to feel the Rat against him, alive and warm, even if bloodied and gasping in pain.

They rode all night long, their only stop at an inn just over the Samavian border, where they changed horses. The innkeeper, who had fought in the War of Restoration on the side of the Fedorovitch, fell to his knees on the ground before them, professing his fealty and virulently decrying the Jiardasians. Young Rastka had to haul him to his feet again with one hand under his arm. “Just bring us the fresh horses. After all this is over I’m sure His Highness will summon you to the Palace in Melzarr for a reward, and then you can kneel and bow to him all you like.”

By the time they reached the aforementioned Palace, Marco was spent: exhausted from the long, hard ride, and adrenaline no longer coursing through him.

“Please,” he said to a Palace Guard, holding out the limp, unconscious Rat. “Carry Lord Ratcliffe to his bedchamber. Be careful; he’s bleeding. We took him from the dungeon in Jiardasia and rode all the night here. Call the royal physician — and a locksmith to remove that damned shackle and chain.”

“Your Highness,” said the Guard, carefully taking the Rat into his arms and turning away purposefully toward the stairs to the upper floors.

Not ten minutes later, Marco was in his own bed, sleeping like the dead.

He woke in the mid-afternoon, rose, washed, and dressed. He was ravenous; the dinner hour being a long while away, he had a servant bring him an apple and some cheese on bread. After taking the edge off his appetite, he sought out his father.

Stefan Loristan, Baron Rastka and his son, and Count Vorvensk were awaiting him in the Royal Council Chamber with news. The peace between the two countries having grown uneasy as of late, the Rat had been in Jiardasia to gather intelligence under the pretense of visiting a friend. That much, Marco had known. Somehow, the Jiardasians had learned of his mission, seized him, taken him to the dungeon, and — seeking to discover what he had learned — flogged him.

“This morning I sent a delegation of diplomats to the Jiardasian capitol,” Stefan Loristan said. “They are to make clear that, while the Jiardasians’ anger is perhaps understandable, their treatment of the Rat was far beyond the pale. If they cannot settle the matter to the satisfaction of all involved, I shall seek an audience with the King of Jiardasia myself.“

“And the Rat?” Marco asked anxiously. “How does he fare?”

“As well as can be expected,” Young Rastka said. “And he was asking for you earlier.”

 

By the time Marco reached the Rat’s bedchamber, the Rat had fallen asleep again. It was a fitful sleep, his pointed features twitching and knotting over and over with pain. He lay on his side hugging a pillow to his chest, the covers pulled up only to his hips. Plasters covered his otherwise bare back, from nape to hunch to small.

“The royal physician gave him something for the pain, as well as for his fever, Your Highness,” the middle-aged nurse said.

“He took fever?” Marco asked sharply.

“With his back laid open like that, Your Highness, and in a cold and filthy dungeon? It would have been miraculous had he not.” She shook her head, her lips drawn back in a snarl. “Jiardasians are savages, all of them.”

“No, not all of them,” Marco said reprovingly.

“Do you know _how_ they flogged him, Your Highness?” the nurse demanded indignantly. “With a cat o’ nine tails. Over his entire back, repeatedly in many spots. Until he lost consciousness.”

Marco kept his face impassive while he fought to suppress a bout of nausea. When he felt able to speak again, he said, “Thank you, nurse. You may leave us for now. I will ring the bell if we need anything, medical or otherwise.”

The nurse, her face still dark with rage, seized the hem of her starched apron and dropped Marco a stiff curtsey. Then she turned and left the chamber as commanded.

When her footsteps had died away down the corridor, Marco barred the bedchamber door. Then he took off his shoes and all his clothes but shirt and drawers, folded the garments neatly, and laid them on a chair before he climbed into the bed beside the Rat.

Very carefully, he took the pillow out of the Rat’s arms and lay it on the bed next to him. Then, lying on his own back, he drew his sleeping friend against him, making sure the Rat remained on his side and that Marco did not touch any place on his back. The Rat’s cheek came to rest in the crook of Marco’s neck and shoulder. Marco, his nose all but buried in the fair cloud of the Rat’s hair, breathed in deeply. The Rat smelled of soap, carbolic acid, and aloe. He did not seem unduly warm; the medicine must have brought his fever down already.

“Marco?” the Rat asked sleepily.

“I am here, Jem,” Marco whispered.

The Rat pressed his front against Marco’s body, like a child against his parent. His right hand, its wrist still bearing the red bite of the iron shackle, came to rest against Marco’s chest. Marco’s eyes traced the hard muscles and prominent veins in the Rat’s upper arm, honed by six years on crutches.

“Thought so,” the Rat muttered. “Smells like you.” His eyes still hadn’t opened. 

Marco closed his own briefly. He had sought merely to comfort the Rat by holding him, as he had done many times before, since they were boys. He had removed most of his clothing so as not to wrinkle it or to soil it with blood or ointments. He hadn’t expected that the feel of the Rat’s body all along his own, or the heat of the Rat’s hand through the silk of his own shirt, would send an incandescent hunger surging throughout him.

He opened his eyes again, then cleared his throat and, nonetheless, asked rather huskily, “Are you still in pain?”

After a few breaths, the Rat said, “Somewhat. The dressing helps. So does whatever medicine they gave me. But…” Now he opened his eyes, scanning Marco’s face rather anxiously.

“But what?” Marco demanded softly.

The Rat hesitated, then said, “I was only going to say that the flogging was severe. You don’t need the details.”

“I’ve had them already, from the nurse.”

The Rat’s lips thinned into a hard line. “I wish she hadn’t told you.”

Marco expelled a sharp breath. “If she hadn’t, and you hadn’t, I’d have asked the physician.”

“I didn’t tell them anything, Marco.”

At first Marco blinked in confusion. If the Rat had not told the nurse or physician anything, how had the nurse known? And then he realized what the Rat had meant. 

With both disbelief and anger, he replied, “As if that were my greatest concern. I wish you _had_ told them something, if it would have spared you any torment.”

The Rat began to shake his head, then stopped with a grimace, for the movement pulled at his welts. “And _I_ am glad I didn’t, even if I bear the scars for the rest of my life. I found out a great deal before I was betrayed. The Jiardasians are our allies in name only.”

“How much of this story have you already told?”

“All of it, to Young Rastka, while my wounds were being dressed.”

“Then you needn’t recount it again just now," Marco said sternly. “He met with his father and mine and Vorvensk, and presumably he’s told them. A diplomatic delegation is headed to Jiardasia even as we speak.”

The Rat’s mouth twisted. “The Jiardasians will profess shame and regret with wide eyes and in hushed tones. The dungeon-keeper will be encouraged to eat his own pistol. If he's lucky he’ll be flogged publicly instead. Not that either would trouble me much. But whoever ordered for me to be beaten will go unnamed and unpunished. The order may have come down through a chain of messengers, so that even the dungeon-keeper doesn’t know who gave it.”

Marco sighed again. “Perhaps we’ll find out before long, thanks to the other intelligence you obtained. Of course, you won’t be the one who returns there. We’ve plenty of other spies.”

After several beats of silence, the Rat said quietly, “If it weren’t the case that my game is completely up in Jiardasia, I would go back again. Without a moment’s hesitation.”

Marco found himself unable to speak, his throat closing and his eyes stinging. He drew back ever so slightly that he could press his lips against the Rat’s forehead. At the bottom of his field of vision, he could see the Rat’s cheeks, flushing pink, and he felt an echoing warmth in his own.

“Your heart is racing, Marco,” the Rat said, pressing his hand slightly harder against Marco’s chest. “Have you a predilection for crippled invalids?”

“Ah, you’ve discovered my shameful secret,” Marco whispered against his forehead. He saw the Rat’s cheeks curve into a smile — and then felt the Rat’s head lifting beneath his, and knew, even before the Rat’s lips brushed against his own.

For all that he had anticipated it for years — ever since he’d met the Rat, really — it was not the wild, torrid kiss of passion long delayed, so often celebrated in song and story. The Rat’s movements were constricted by pain, and Marco had no wish to add to that pain; and, too, the Rat was still a bit befogged from the medicine. But the kiss was deep and lush and intimate, for all that it was slow and careful.

When Marco drew back to gulp a bit of air, the Rat’s eyes were startlingly dark.

“That took long enough,” the Rat said, a hint of mockery in his voice even though there was none in his face. “Six years, has it been?”

“It was well worth waiting for,” Marco retorted, lifting the Rat’s sharp chin and kissing him again. When their mouths separated for the second time, both of them were breathing a little faster.

Then the Rat’s eyes widened and he lost a bit of color, and he said, “The door—”

“Barred,” Marco said, kissing his forehead once more. “And I told the nurse not to come back unless we rang for her. The important question is, what can we do that won’t pain your wounds?”

“Hmm,” the Rat said. Marco knew him well enough to know that he only played at being lost in thought. But he hadn’t expected the Rat’s hand to slide down his chest and belly until it was cupping him through his drawers, nor the Rat to say, “This, perhaps?”

He let out a moan, not extremely loud, but high and keen with surprise and pleasure. The Rat grinned broadly again beneath flushed cheeks. “That seems to have been a good idea,” he said. With the same hand, the same powerful arm, he took Marco by the hip and turned him onto his side, so that they faced one another. Then, hand splayed against that hip, he pressed his body full against Marco’s.

“Oh, God, Jem,” Marco gasped against the Rat’s mouth, which moved demandingly over his. The response was a husky laugh, and the Rat’s hand sliding down between them once more.

“Have you ever done _this_ before, Marco?” The Rat’s voice was like a ribbon of silk, wound around intimate places on Marco and rubbing back and forth repeatedly.

“Have I ever done— _oh._ ”

For the Rat’s hand had slipped into Marco’s drawers and curled around him. The initial sense that he might leap out of his own skin, a sense like a knife heated white, softened and blossomed throughout him. He closed his eyes in a half-swoon, caught up in the feeling of how he throbbed inside the tight circle of the Rat’s clever fingers.

And then he was free of his drawers, and he was being pressed against something other than fingers, something else warm and hard and slick at the tip, and the breath flew out of him as if he’d taken a blow to the belly.

“Jem, oh, my _God_ —”

“Shh.” This time the Rat merely drew the tip of his tongue over Marco’s lips. Marco pushed his face forward, desperate for another kiss, but the Rat turned his face slightly away, and if Marco couldn’t quite see the curve of his lips he could see how the sly smile rounded the sharp contours of the Rat’s face. He wanted to kiss every rise and dip of it. He would. When he wasn’t quite so distracted. Why was the Rat letting both of them go now, why was he raising his hand to his own face…?

Eyes focused on Marco’s, the Rat slowly licked the traces of both of them from his own palm, drawing his tongue over it languidly and obscenely, coating it thickly with saliva. Marco bit his own lower lip hard, which didn’t stifle the wordless noise he made at the sight. 

Then the Rat dropped his hand to encircle the both of them again, and when Marco cried out he leaned forward and captured Marco’s mouth again with his own, hard. Even with the Rat’s tongue moving insistently against his own, Marco could not remain silent as the Rat’s hand began to move over both of them, tight and warm and wet, his thumb brushing over the tips, smoothing viscous fluid over both of them.

He was shuddering with sensations: the feel of intimate flesh against intimate flesh; the insistent and knowing glide of the Rat’s hand; the warmth of the Rat’s bare chest and hips and thighs against him, either skin to skin or through the silk of his shirt; the dart of the Rat’s tongue within his mouth. The shudders built, as if the bounds of his own skin suppressed and intensified them, and then his hips were rocking hard, out of his control.

“Oh, _yes_ ,” the Rat whispered against his mouth, and as his hand glided upward again, he moved his thumb with a twisting motion that left Marco nearly unable to see for a few seconds. “Come, Marco. Come with me—”

Marco sunk both hands into the Rat’s hair and kissed him as hard as he'd been kissed a moment before, pushing both their jaws open as wide as possible, as he thrust against the Rat’s hand, the Rat’s body. And then both of them were gasping and whimpering into one another’s mouths as the chamber disappeared in a brilliant mist of pleasure.

When he came to himself again, he lay limp on the bed, panting. The Rat had sagged against him, his own breathing rough and ragged. Their skin was moist with sweat, and moister still with—

“I’ll take care of that,” Marco said, sitting up and swinging his bare legs over the edge of the bed.

“The nurse could instead,” the Rat said, sounding somewhat dazed.

“God, no. She doesn’t need to know about this.” Marco stood at the washstand, pouring tepid water from the ewer into the bowl. He picked up a cloth and soaked it thoroughly, then returned to the bed. 

“It’s not as though she hasn’t… cleaned that up before,” the Rat said, a hint of mischief in his voice.

“Well, of course she has, she’s a nurse.” Marco pulled back the covers, then dabbed and wiped at the Rat’s belly and thighs, as well as his own, blotting up whatever he could.

“I meant earlier today, Marco. I had a very lovely dream about you, all the pain notwithstanding. Maybe you holding me all the way home gave my mind some ideas. In any event I woke up quite wet.”

“Oh.” Marco’s face was burning again as he mopped up the last bits. He balled up the cloth and set it on the night table.

The Rat was chuckling. “God, you’re easy to make blush. Come here, my dearest liege.”

Marco settled down beside the Rat, once more gathering his friend against him and settling his head into the crook of his own neck. The Rat draped his arm over Marco’s chest and clasped his forearm. They lay together quietly for a while. The Rat did not twitch or spasm; Marco listened to his easy breathing, noted his calmer expression.

Finally, he said, “No, I hadn’t done that before.”

The Rat smiled. “That much was obvious.”

“You’re rather good at it.”

The smile faltered. “The man I’ve done that the most with is… the friend in Jiardasia I was visiting.”

Marco went cold beside him.

“Is that…” He didn’t finish the question.

The Rat didn’t reply for a long moment. Then he said, “I have no proof. They didn’t tell me when they hauled me off, of course.”

“But you suspect that this ‘friend’ is the one who betrayed you?”

“Strongly.” The word came out cutting and bitter.

“I am sorry,” Marco whispered. He leaned his cheek against the Rat’s, not daring a even chaste kiss in this moment. The Rat didn’t speak or move. His eyelashes shone faintly.

Another very long moment passed. Then the Rat said, softly but with steel in his voice, “I wouldn’t have told the Jiardasians anything, anyway. But, when they arrested me and I realized how I was likely betrayed, it gave me more strength than I needed to withstand the flogging. Because I could, I will, _never_ do to you what he did to me, Marco.”

Marco’s own eyes stung now. He said nothing, because what reply can one make to such a declaration that would even begin to be worthy of it? He pressed himself more closely against the Rat, who clung more tightly to Marco’s arm. 

After a long, long while, Marco realized the Rat’s eyes were closed again and that he breathed slowly and easily. With care and without hurry, Marco eased himself out from under the Rat’s arm and pushed his own pillow beneath it once more. The Rat clutched it to him tightly in his sleep.

Marco rose from the bed and dressed. He leaned down and softly kissed the Rat’s forehead before drawing the covers up to the Rat’s hips once again. Then he went to the door, unbarred it, and left the bedchamber. He would pass the nurse’s quarters on his way downstairs; he would tell her himself that he was remanding his sworn man back into her care.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by Osprey_Archer’s [“Nothing But the Truth,”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1108392) plus a comment about it that the fandom needs more dungeon fic. (Most of this fic doesn’t take place in a dungeon, though, so I don’t know that it merits the name entirely.) This wasn’t beta’ed, so any errors are my fault.


End file.
